SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND COMMITMENT IN MANAGEMENT INSTITUTES: MEDIATION BY ENGAGEMENT

. Due to its major influence on individual’s performance, engagement is increasingly becoming popular among practi­ tioners. While its influence on performance has been well established, research on the influence of variables related to organiza­ tions on engagement is still in its nascent stage. Therefore, this study examines the mediating role of employee engagement in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) – organizational commitment relationship. Multiple regression results using responses from 150 academics working in Indian management institutes predominantly owned by business groups partially support the relationships hypothesized. The findings may encourage Indian management institutes owned by business groups to consider CSR in teaching and research as serious investment areas in order to have a more engaged and committed workforce.


Introduction
The concept of employee engagement (EE) has received considerable attention of academics and practitioners in the last decade. While the initial need for research in EE was felt mainly in industries, a few research studies invigorate the need of extending the study of EE to the academia (e.g. Brexo, Boud 2009). Although, scholars have conducted EE studies on the academics working in higher education insti tutions (e.g. Ouweneel et al. 2012), little theory or empirical research accounts for the role of EE in linking corporate social responsibility (CSR) and organizational commit ment (OC) especially in the context of Indian subconti nent wherein the engagement is at an alarmingly low level (Kohli, Grover 2013). This is reflected in the news that in the year 2013 itself, about 94 management institutes 1 applied for closure (Chhapia 2013). Therefore, the examination of institutes, the rest of the paper has been divided into four sections. The first section of the present study consists of understanding CSR, EE and OC, thereby describing each of these constructs individually and also their relation ships with each other. The second section is 'methods' which describes the participants and the measures. The third section pertains to the results obtained and their analysis. The last section espouses discussion on findings and implications for future research.

Corporate social responsibility
Ever since the onset of industrialization in England, CSR has been a concept of interest for researchers. But its evolution is yet not over. Termed as social respon sibility in the 1950s, CSR was understood as aligning policies, decisions and actions with societal values and expectations of the society (Bowen 1953). The literature on CSR further developed during the 1960s and Davis (1960) clarified that CSR is actions and decisions taken for reasons to some extent beyond a firm's operational activity. 1970s was the decade that witnessed a surge in the definition of CSR both in terms of quantity and quality. Johnson (1971) argued that a business cannot be done in isolation and businesses must therefore have an inherent duty to take care of parties that are directly or indirectly affected by decisions of firms. Businessmen following this path were regarded as "socially respon sible entrepreneurs" or "socially responsible managers". Unlike Johnson, who focused on businessmen, Manne and Wallich (1972) set forth an eligibility criterion for an activity to qualify as CSR. According to them, it is a voluntary activity for which a firm incurs opportunity cost. Fitch (1976) subsequently defined CSR as a seri ous attempt to solve a social problem caused due to a corporation. Jones (1980) explained CSR as a volun tary duty of a corporation towards its stakeholders other than shareholders. In 1990s, Carroll (1994) introduced dimensions, namely: economic, legal, ethical and phil anthropic to CSR and termed a pyramidal approach to it as "corporate citizenship". For the sake of convenience and to address the two distinct but interrelated sections of academics, CSR hereinafter has been divided into CSR in teaching (CSRT) and CSR in research (CSRR). By CSRT here we mean a sense of helping the society by imparting knowledge without getting or expecting any monetary benefit in return. By CSRR we mean a sense of selfless involvement in research which is beneficial for the society. Teaching and research in the Indian man agement institutes (Indian institutes that are mainly or only offering management course(s)) combine to form the context of this study.

Employee engagement
The term, "engagement" was originally coined by Kahn (1990). According to it, engagement is the emotional, physical and cognitive attachment of an employee with its work. Due to its orientation towards practice, re searchers have subsequently explored; Townsend et al. (2014) and tested the theory of engagement in the work place. Schaufeli et al. (2002) for instance, found vigour, dedication, and absorption as important measures of engagement. Harter et al. (2002) developed the con struct of engagement empirically by establishing burn out-antithesis link and testing satisfaction-engagement nexus respectively. Likewise, Saks (2006) proposed a multidimensional approach that explored various as pects of employee engagement construct holistically. However, researchers find engagement, a highly contex tual construct (Wang et al. 2013) and hence, exploring the antecedents of engagement in different contexts is important. Moreover, review of multiple articles on the engagement-performance relationship by Shuck (2013) concludes that an engaged employee is a better perform er and that is why the construct deserves more attention (Christian et al. 2011).
Prior studies also highlight the distinctive characteris tics of EE from its peer concepts (VigodaGadot et al. 2013). For example, job involvement is the extent to which in dividuals psychologically identify themselves with their jobs and find their personal goals aligned with that of their organization (Dimitriades 2007) whereas, EE is a broader concept and involves physical attachment with the job and organization as well. Similarly, organizational commitment has been conceptualized as the level of loy alty an organization's employee possesses with its orga nization (Porter et al. 1974) but a loyal employee may not necessarily derive optimum performance from the employee. The definition of EE given by Schaufeli et al. (2002) addressed these issues and built a more measur able EE as a construct. According to them, EE is "a posi tive, fulfilling work related state of mind characterized by vigour, dedication and absorption" (93). So, EE, job involvement and organizational commitment are distinct yet interrelated constructs.

Organizational commitment
Researchers in the past have adopted a variety of approach es to define OC (Mowday et al. 1979). In terms of attitude, OC is when the "identity of the person (is linked) to the organization" (Sheldon 1971: 143). On the other hand, it was also defined as the degree of acceptance of organiza tional goals by an employee (Porter et al. 1974). However, Morrow (1983) recommended a more holistic and reliable definition of OC. Becker (1992) therefore restricted the definition of OC to three sub-constructs namely (1) em ployee's compliance driven by rewards and punishments, (2) identification which is nothing but a desire for affilia tion, and (3) internalization which refers to the congruence of the individual values with that of the organization.
Institutes offering higher education in America were identified as businesses by researchers (e.g. Slaughter, Leslie 1997) and what they called "academic capitalism" (Rhoades, Slaughter 2004). Like America, many business groups have also started their own management institutes in India. For example, the Tata group operating a chain of Xavier management institutes, the Birla group with management institutes in multiple locations and the Singhania group operating J K Lakshmipat management schools are to name a few. Researchers have consistently criticized the activities of management institutes becoming similar to a business group. Ghoshal (2005) for instance, has warned manage ment institutes for their increased inclination towards profit making. The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM) finds the situation of Indian management institutes even worse. According to it, as many as 160 India management institutes are still strug gling for their survival (ASSOCHAM 2013). The report also emphasized on shifting focus from the sole goal of profit making to attracting and retaining quality faculties. Given the high amount of emphasis placed by the Indian manage ment institutes on profit, treating their activities as business activities therefore seems logical. Furthermore, a research by Patel et al. (2004) has highlighted the ways and means by which faculty of a management institute can discharge their social responsibility through research by focusing on practi cal social issues and teaching by educating students about the importance of CSR in creating a better organization.

Relationship of CSR and EE
According to The Business Communicator (2005) re port, employee engagement is a social process by which people become personally implicated in strategy and change in their daily work. Hall (2005) argued that excluding people from social groups can be designed to make the manager seem incompetent. Moreover, social variables provide a meaningful theoretical basis for understanding and study ing employee engagement (Saks 2006). Those who are in volved in selfless voluntary social work do not expect any thing in return are expected to continue with the organiza tion irrespective of whether their actions are recognized or not. The happiness that they receive by doing such activities rejuvenates them physically, cognitively, and emotionally. Xanthopoulou et al. (2009) tested reciprocal relation ships between job resources and work engagement and found social aspect of job resources as an important an tecedent of engagement. Moreover, one aspect of develop ing passion in the workplace is by providing a nurturing environment and a sense of community (Boverie, Kroth 2001) whereby individuals are attracted by the social affilia tions and meaning that work provides (Hodson 2004). Since engagement means attachment of employees to their job roles, CSR provides them a sense of community so that em ployees can derive more meaning out of their job. Following hypotheses capture the social aspect of EE ( Fig. 1): Hypothesis 1a. Corporate social responsibility in teach ing positively influences employee engagement.
Hypothesis 1b. Corporate social responsibility in re search positively influences employee engagement.

Relationship of EE and OC
The organizational commitment definition given by Becker (1992) provides valuable insights for the psychological fac tors that constitute OC including internalization, iden tification, and compliance of employees with their orga nizations. Engaged employees feel proud in associating themselves with their organizations. They invest their energies at multiple levels such as cognitive, emotional, and physical because they think their work is significant and their efforts are valuable to their organizations. This in vestment of energies is possible because engaged employees are able to align their values with the organizational values and comply with the organizational said and unsaid norms.
Tested in the context of nursing, Cho et al. (2006) found that their model proposing work engagement affecting organizational commitment had significant correlations among the items of EE and OC. Hakanen et al. (2006) car ried out a study on teachers and found that Job resources are related to organizational commitment through work engagement. Saks (2006) and Lockwood (2007) in their respective studies also found EE, a decedent of OC both empirically and conceptually. The hypothesis given below attempts to test the effect of EE on OC: Hypothesis 2. Employee engagement positively influ ences organizational commitment.
Note: CSRT = corporate social responsibility in teaching; CSRR = corporate social responsibility in research; EE = employee enga gement; OC = organizational commitment.

Relationship of CSR and OC
Humans, being a social entity need to socialize for fulfilling their daytoday requirements. Voluntary social work in tea ching and research provides them opportunity to give back to that society, which has enabled them to earn their livelihood. These actions make them feel happy as they unload the guilt of being only at the receiving end. The organizations that encourage or allow their employees to involve in society employee exchange related activities without any interrup tion make their employees develop a feeling of gratitude and commitment towards their organizations. Therefore, the employees who highly believe in giving back to the society tend to be more committed to their organizations.
There are plenty of studies that indicate that CSR signifi cantly influences OC. For example, Turker (2009) applied social identity theory on different business professionals and discovered that CSR to social and non-social stakeholders, employees, and customers were the significant predictors of OC. Other previous studies, including Ali et al. (2010) and Boddy et al. (2010) also agree with the positive relationship between CSR and OC. Likewise, Albdour et al. (2010) did a study in the banking sector of Jordon and found significant positive relationship between CSR and OC. Thus, it is also important to test the CSR-OC nexus in the present study with the help of below hypotheses: Hypothesis 3a. Corporate social responsibility in teach ing positively influences organizational commitment.
Hypothesis 3b. Corporate social responsibility in re search positively influences organizational commitment.

EE as a mediator between CSR and OC
Review of literature in the previous sections explains the causal positive relationships among CSR, EE, and OC. In that, CSR would have a direct positive relationship with EE and OC. Also, EE would have a direct positive relationship with OC. Therefore, there is possibility that CSR would indirectly lead to OC through EE. It is expected that CSR in teaching and research enables employees to attach them selves not only with their work roles but also with their organizations.
Saks (2006) did a study on employees working in a va riety of jobs and found that EE mediates the relationship between job characteristics and OC. A similar study was done by Hakanen et al. (2008) in the hospital industry that established the relationship mediating role of EE between job resources and OC. Since, CSR is one of the variables in job resources, the below hypotheses provide a means to capture the mediation impact of EE in the CSR-OC rela tionship.
Hypothesis 4a. Employee engagement mediates the rela tionship between corporate social responsibility in teaching and organizational commitment.
Hypothesis 4b. Employee engagement mediates the rela tionship between corporate social responsibility in research and organizational commitment.

Sample and procedures
The participants included 150 academics working in va rious Indian Management institutes owned by business groups. For the purpose of data collection, an online questionnaire was generated and its link was posted on a Facebook group which had over one thousand Management institute teachers of India as its members. The respondents were requested to complete the ques tionnaire containing demographic and model specific questions. In this way, the questionnaire was filled up only by the respondents interested to respond. A note was also posted stating that only those respondents need to fill the questionnaires, who teach in institutes owned by a business group. Out of the total 150 respondents selected at random, 59.3% were male. 40.0% percent were Professors (Assistant Professor, Associate Professor and Professor), 27.3% were research scholars or teaching as sociates enrolled in the full time doctoral program and simultaneously teaching and the rest were Lecturers, visi ting faculty and adjunct faculty. 72.2% of the respondents belonged to the private sector management institutes and the remaining belonged to the "others" category which includes semi-public management institutes (Table 1). Since, the questionnaire contained questions about the institutes' management, the respondents were assured of anonymity by not asking from them their or their organization's name.

Measures
The constructs in the present research paper were mea sured using pre-tested and well-established scales. For example, CSR in teaching and research was measured using Turker's 5-item summarized scale (Turker 2009). Minor changes in the scale were made to suit the current context. A sample item of CSR scale includes: "Being socially responsible is the most important thing an ins titute can do through research". EE was measured on a 12-item Gallup scale (Gallup, 2006). A sample item of EE scale includes: "My supervisor or someone at work seems to care about me as a person". The level of OC was calculated on a 6-item scale used by Rhoades et al. (2001). A sample item of OC scale includes: "I feel a strong sense of belonging to my organization". All the scales had 5-point Likert scale with options ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. All the responses of respondents with at least 6 months of experience with their current organization (a pre-requisite as per Gallup scale) were considered valid. Since, the data collection was carried out in the month of January which means that all the respondents would have at least six month experience as they must have joined their institutes du ring admissions that happen in June in India.

Results
With all the scales resulting in greater than 0.70 Cronbach's alpha, the results obtained were quite reliable. All the cor relations among the constructs were significant (p < .01). Most of the results were is line with what we expected. Two models were tested with the same data set. In the first model, CSRR and CSRT were taken as independent va riables and OC was taken as dependent variable without any mediator. However, on the introduction of EE as a mediator, we noticed a significant change in the R-square value from 0.465 to 0.851. It also means that a model which without EE could explain only 46.5% variation in OC can explain 84.8% variance in OC with the inclusion of EE as a mediator. Though, both CSRT (β = 0.59) and CSRR (β = 0.17) were significant (p < .01), after EE was introduced, CSRR became insignificant. Hence, EE fully mediates the CSRR-OC relationship. As far as mediation by EE in the CSRT-OC relationship is concerned, the results did not indicate full mediation. However, due to the presence of significant regression coefficients in the CSRT-EE-OC nexus, tests of partial mediation were carried out. For tes ting partial mediation, Sobel test, Aroian test and Goodman test were conducted and their values obtained were 8.289, 8.280 and 8.298 respectively. All these values were signifi cant (p < .01) and hence the presence of partial mediation by EE in the CSRT-OC relationship was confirmed. The aforementioned results indicate that compared to CSRT, CSRR is perceived as a better determinant of OC when the CSRR-OC relationship is mediated by EE. Table 1 describes the general classification of the partici pants' demographics in terms of their frequencies and per centages. The mean age of participants was about 43 years. EE and OC were found to be highly correlated with a correlation coefficient slightly greater than 0.90 (Table 2). Results also reveal that EE fully mediates only the CSRR and OC relation ship and partially mediates the CSRR and OC relationship (Table 3). Except hypothesis 4a which is partially supported, all the other hypotheses, on account of their significant and positive path coefficients were fully supported. Also, in order to ensure that both, CSRT (t = 77.42) and CSRR (t = 80.75) are sufficiently different from each other, one sample t-test was conducted and the results indicated significant difference between the two constructs (p < .01).

Conclusions and scope for future research
It is evident by now that there is a clear consensus in the research fraternity on the existence of causal relationships among CSR, EE and OC. Although past research had linked CSR with EE (e.g., Ferreira, de Oliveira 2014) but their scope were limited to industry only. This study, on the ot her hand found that in spite of CSR affecting EE positive ly, CSR in research contributes fully and CSR in teaching contributes partially to the EE and in-turn finally to OC. Another important contribution of this research lies in the finding that EE is an important variable that mediates the relationship between CSR and OC. As far as practical impli cations are concerned, the study would benefit the industry in three essential ways. Firstly, the results of the study, we argue, would encourage management of the institutes to pay due attention to CSR activities by setting goals that are beneficial for the society. Secondly, since an engaged and committed workforce enhances productivity, the manage ment is expected to treat CSR as a long term investment in their academics. Thirdly, the results indicate that paying greater attention to CSR in research compared to CSR in teaching would possess a better engaged and committed workforce. For this purpose, the management will have to measure the performance of the academics for research and teaching separately in terms of CSR (Altbach, Levy 2005). Our research, though explains CSR -EE -OC nexus, further work is advisable on testing this research in Indian subcontinent. It is because India inherits a variety of cul tures that are akin to the culture of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives and Sri Lanka. Thus, the results of our study may logically replicable in these countries as well. While the research in the Indian subcontinent appears feasible with the current methodology, one must be careful in translating the questionnaire in the South Asian countries other than the Indian subcontinent countries. Additional care should be taken while replicating these results to a nonindustry owned educational institute because otherwise the usage of the term CSR could be misleading. At this juncture, it would also be interesting and enlightening to know the cross-cultural issues in the results of a comparative study between two developing Asian countries with greater dif ferences in their culture and practices like India vs China. We also urge future researches to address the issues arising out of the differences (if any) because of using other popular EE scales like Schaufeli and Bakker (2003) and May et al. (2004) instead of Gallup's EE scale.
Although the findings of this study are in line with our expectations, our research like any other research in hu man resource development is also not free from limitations. Firstly, the nature of this study being cross -sectional leaves limited scope for establishing and inferring causal relation ships among variables. Therefore, we recommend future studies to carry out longitudinal studies so that the degree of change in the responses could be captured. Secondly, the measures used in this study were self-reported which might have suffered from the issue of common method bias. However, the nature of the variables itself is investigation about oneself and so, the methods, including dyadic feed back and peer review should not discount the generaliz ability of this study. Moreover, this study was limited to the context of Indian management institutes that are owned by business groups, but future research can also comprehend other academic areas for the greater generalizability of the results.
In short, the objective of testing the mediating role of EE between the relationship of CSR and OC in the Indian management institutes' context was realized in this paper. In particular, we draw two important conclusions from this paper. Firstly, CSRR does positively and significantly impact OC through EE and which goes as per our expectation. Secondly and surprisingly, EE only partially mediates the CSRT-OC relationship. It means that engagement plays a vital role in enhancing workforce commitment for the insti tutes where emphasis is more on research than the institutes where emphasis is more on teaching.

Funding
This research study was not funded by any individual or organization.